Christian satire implying Islamic disapproval reveals solidarity with Islam

Evidence

Yet it remains true that the satire, however common-place in itself, was in many instances specifically related to Islamic disapproval; the bare fact that it was supposed that Muslims must disapprove the wickedness of Christians is evidence of a sense of solidarity, perhaps even of community, with Islam, which persisted in spite of the theories about Muslim morals which then obtained. Moreover, there is at least sometimes the implication that Muslims exercised the virtues opposed to the Christian vices in question; and Busone’s choice of epithets for Saladin to apply to God, mild, merciful, just, wise, is distantly suggestive of Qur’anic language. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1111

Categorization

• SEED: Essay angle: the imagined Muslim judge as a medieval literary device for self-criticism — how the Other’s standards become the mirror for one’s own community’s vices, which maps onto modern uses of foreign norms to critique the West.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that imagining outsiders’ moral disapproval of one’s own vices constitutes evidence of community solidarity — not hostility — is a genuinely counterintuitive and transferable insight about cross-cultural moral psychology.
• XREF: connects to: Praise of Muslim morals served only as a satirical critique of Christians